Silver Linings Playbook

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A rom-com about mental health, American football and ballroom dancing? It’s crazy, but true, says Kate Muir

There’s a madness in Bradley Cooper’s eyes at the best of times, an aura of
the young Nicolas Cage about the man. Thus Cooper was ideal casting for this
rom-com which romps on the edges of sanity and delights in the
inappropriate. Cooper’s co-star out there on the edges of the spectrum is
Jennifer Lawrence; a dark-haired, predatory young widow.

The director David O. Russell, who caught America’s working-class milieu so
well in The Fighter, settles into the run-down suburbs of
Philadelphia, where Pat Solitano (Cooper) is forced to live with his parents
after his release from a mental hospital.